This is not a facetious answer to your question of what happens to large
electronic projects after people depart. Unfortunately much must get
lost. But perhaps we could persuade people to include directions in
their wills?

>Along the same lines: What happens to our projects when we shuffle off? I
>know of several colleagues who, like me, are somewhat superannuated, but have
>large repositories of texts which might benefit the scholarly world. What
>happens to them?

It rather depends. If they are altruistic, or even moderately charitable, they
could do a lot worse than sending the stuff along to the Oxford Text Archive
(http://info.ox.ac.uk/~archive/) which has been accumulating electronic
resources of this kind for the last 20 years.

I suppose another pre-condition is that they know of the OTA's existence. As Dr
Marchand apparently doesn't, we're clearly not trying hard enough. Hmm.